Thursday, October 30, 2014

Some Tuareg-Songhay loans

I'm almost three-quarters of the way through Heath's Grammar of Tamashek (Tuareg of Mali). The main interest lies in its efforts to reduce the bewildering complexity of Tuareg morphology to some sort of order, an impossible task which it accomplishes more successfully than any other Tuareg grammar I've looked at so far. Aside from this, however, it's raised some interesting etymological issues.

I've wondered for years where the Korandjé verb wəy "gather (firewood)" comes from. It normally appears in the idiom a-wwəy-ts skudzi [3Sg-gather-hither wood] "she gathered in firewood". On p. 333 of Heath's grammar, I found the explanation, in the following example:

The Tamasheq verb in question, awəy in the imperative, is simply the normal Berber word for "take, bring" (which in Korandjé is expressed with a Songhay verb, zəw), so I would have hesitated to connect them based on a dictionary entry alone. But given this attested usage with "firewood", the semantic specialisation poses no problems. What does surprises me is that it was borrowed as a bare stem, rather than with a fossilised 3rd person prefix y/i - contrast yəf (Tashelhiyt y-arf "roast", not attested in Tamasheq), ikna "make" (Tamasheq i-kna). Usually, only stems that start with a syllabic onset are borrowed into Korandjé without the y/i.

Another probable loan into Korandjé that I noticed going through the grammar is Korandjé ləwləw "shine, gleam" - cp. Tamasheq m̀ələwləw "shine".

However, a number of words have gone the other way - from Songhay into Tuareg. Heath comments on many of these in his dictionary (eg kə̀rikəw "practice sorcery"), but not all. One that struck me is the verb ḍùkr-æt "become angry at", obviously related to Gao Songhay dukur "be angry"; I don't recall seeing this verb elsewhere in Berber (not even in Alojaly's dictionary of Tamajeq), whereas it's widespread in Songhay.

Obviously cognate are Tamasheq é-tæqq "male ostrich" and widespread Songhay forms such as Gao taatagey, Fulan Kirya taataɣey "ostrich" (the shift of g to ɣ next to non-high back vowels is regular in several Songhay varieties, and in Tamasheq qq is the geminate equivalent of ɣ). The word is generic in Songhay but specific in Tuareg - the opposite of what we saw with "bring" - which suggests to me that it was borrowed into the latter, as does the fact that I don't find the term in Alojaly's Tamajeq dictionary. However, since ostriches are extinct in most Berber-speaking areas, it's difficult to prove the direction of borrowing.

I don't think 'sombrero', 'aloo gobi', and the like are a good equivalent. In all these cases, speakers of the receiver language are familiar with the borrowed item in its generic sense, but not in the restricted sense (e.g. English speakers familiar with houses, but not with arctic ice houses.) This is different. If a Tuareg speaker is familiar with ostriches, they would also be familiar with male ostriches.

I speculate that the crux of this is that male ostriches provide the more luxurious black feathers. Perhaps the Tuareg provided male ostrich feathers to the Songhay, who applied the specific name of the trade item to the bird in general. Alternatively, in Songhay the word for the more valuable gender became generic, just as English chicken went from young fowl, the kitchen favorite, to a generic term.

I shamefully admit that I am wholly uneducated on the subject of early ostrich trading in the Sahel.

What does surprises me is that it was borrowed as a bare stem, rather than with a fossilised 3rd person prefix y/i - contrast yəf (Tashelhiyt y-arf "roast", not attested in Tamasheq), ikna "make" (Tamasheq i-kna). Usually, only stems that start with a syllabic onset are borrowed into Korandjé without the y/i.

I fail to follow this — what would a stem with a "syllabic onset" be, if a vowel-anlaut stem such as y-arf doesn't count?

(Also, amusing side fact: skudzi 'wood' rather brings to mind Helsinki slang skutsi 'forest'; a loan from a local dialect form of Swedish skog 'id.')

The stem is arf, whose first (and arguably only) syllable has no onset (not even a glottal stop). Likewise, the k in i-kna is a coda rather than an onset. Contrast with səndəf "reopen a wound", whose first syllable has the onset s; it is borrowed as səndəf, with no prefix.